The Art of the Possible
Speaker of the House John Boehner Photo Credit: flickr.com/Peter Stevens
The day after the Pope gave a historic speech to the joint houses of Congress, the Speaker of the House John Boehner announced he would resign both his speakership and his membership in the House. Faced with a revolt from House conservatives seeking to supplant him, Boehner decided it would be better both for the institution of the House and for himself to resign. “My first job as speaker is to protect the institution,” he said. When news of this resignation was announced by Senator Marco Rubio to the annual Value Voters conference in Washington, spontaneous cheers rang out. I noticed Rubio himself did not look particularly pleased.
There are many reasons for no Republican to feel pleased by this development. Many of the Republican voter base have unrealistic expectations of what Republican control of both houses of Congress enables them to do. Without enough Senate votes to invoke cloture of a filibuster, bills passed in the House would die in the Senate. Even if a bill passed both houses of Congress, President Obama would almost certainly veto any bill produced by the Republicans. To override any presidential veto would require the Republicans to have two-thirds of the votes in each congressional chamber, 291 in the House and 67 votes in the Senate. The Republicans currently have only 247 seats in the House and 54 seats in the Senate. The GOP does not have a prayer of overriding a presidential veto with no support from the Democrats.
Nevertheless, some feel a real point would be made just by placing passed bills on the President’s desk. Then when Obama vetoes them and Democratic representatives and senators do not support overrides, it should become abundantly clear to the public just who the party of “no” is. However to do this, the Republicans would have to defeat any Democratic filibuster in the Senate.
Bills in the Senate can be filibustered to death without having three-fifths (60) of the senators voting for cloture. The Republicans currently hold only 54 of the seats. If Republican senators wanted to exercise the so-called “nuclear option” of changing Senate rules to limit filibusters, say by requiring only a simple majority to invoke cloture, the rule change itself could be filibustered. The only way around a senatorial filibuster would be somehow to make the desired bill part of a reconciliation resolution, designed to reconcile different House and Senate versions of a budget resolution. Debate time would then be limited.
There is a small bit of arcane procedure that hinders doing anything substantive this way. A budget resolution or a reconciliation resolution is not a bill; it does not become law when passed. Instead, it is a kind of a framework within which authorization bills, which do become law, must fit. As a framework, it binds Congress in what it can do in spending money, but it has no other effect. It is the authorization bills which do the actual work of authorizing spending. A budget resolution or reconciliation resolution gives Congress budget authority to authorize expenditures, but that is all. While it does not become law, any budget or reconciliation resolution must still be signed by the President to become effective.
Therefore, the only major move Republicans can take, say in defunding Obamacare, is to pass reconciliation resolutions that do not include Obamacare in the the budget authority. Which the President will promptly veto, and the Republicans will not be able to override. If this budgetary conflict between the President and the Republican Congress continued, no budget would be enacted and the Republicans would be left with two choices. Either supply a continuing resolution, which would authorize the last passed budget bill for a specified period of time, or let nonessential parts of the government shut down. We have gone down this last route several times, with the result that heavy news-media partisanship for the Democrats has given Republicans a black-eye with the public each time.
It is because of his refusal to continue to follow this course of self-immolation that John Boehner is being hounded out of Congress. The Tea Party conservatives in the House have a point that the opposition to what Obama and the Democrats want to do to this country must ceaselessly be resisted, but to do so in a way that causes the country to reject the Republicans seems more than a little dumb. The results of past shutdowns seem to indicate another way to fight must be found. The Republican electoral base and the tea-party conservatives should have a greater respect for the art of the possible.
I will miss John Boehner and his stamina and courage in facing our country’s exponentially growing problems.
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